By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck*
Editorial pages and blogs have been overrun in the past couple of weeks with analyses and speculation about the detainee provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, which the President has just signed into law. One of the major disputes concerns whether and how the NDAA might alter the status quo. In this post, we’ll try to synthesize the competing views offered by David Cole and Raha Wala, who remain quite critical of the provisions because of the changes they possibly presage, with those of Bobby Chesney and Ben Wittes, who argue that the NDAA doesn’t do nearly as much as its critics claim to affect the Executive’s current authorities and practices. As we explain, there’s considerable merit to both sets of arguments. Perhaps the most important impact of the NDAA, however, may be with respect to a question that has received comparatively little attention–namely, the effect of the laws of war on the Executive’s military detention authority. In a companion post, we take a closer look at that important question.
The Bad
David Cole is surely correct that Subtitle D (“Counterterrorism”) of the NDAA contains some very troubling provisions—especially sections 1026 and 1027, which continue the deeply unfortunate and counterproductive authorities in current law prohibiting the use of funds to build a facility in the U.S. to house GTMO detainees and to transfer any such detainees to the U.S. for any reason, including criminal trial; and section 1028, which continues the current statutory requirement that the Secretary of Defense must make onerous certifications regarding the receiving nation’s security measures before any GTMO detainee can be transferred to another country. These provisions will continue to prevent the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo, notwithstanding the President’s view, which we share, that “the prison at Guantánamo Bay undermines our national security, and our nation will be more secure the day when that prison is finally and responsibly closed.”
Moreover, and as David further notes, section 1022 purports to establish a presumption in favor of indefinite military detention, rather than criminal arrest and prosecution, for some future foreign al-Qaeda suspects. In the President’s words, it is in this respect “ill-conceived and will do nothing to improve the security of the United States,” and “is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty.” Fortunately, amendments adopted late in the legislative process—particularly a change to the section 1022 waiver provision and the addition of a new provision that “[n]othing in [section 1022] shall be construed to affect the existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other domestic law enforcement agency with regard to a covered person”—will, we think, ensure that section 1022 is mostly hortatory, and will in practice allow the President to adhere to his commitments that “suspected terrorists arrested inside the United States will—in keeping with long-standing tradition—be processed through our Article III courts, as they should be”; that “our military does not patrol our streets or enforce our laws—nor should it”; and that “when it comes to U.S. citizens involved in terrorist-related activity, whether they are captured overseas or at home, we will prosecute them in our criminal justice system.” As the President wrote today, he will construe section 1022 to afford “the full and unencumbered ability to waive any military custody requirement, including the option of waiving appropriate categories of cases when doing so is in the national security interests of the United States.” (We would also note that, under a plain-language reading, section 1022 would not even cover persons apprehended in the U.S. by the FBI or other law-enforcement officials: That provision applies only to a person “who is captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the AUMF”—and in the case of a domestic FBI or other law-enforcement arrest, presumably neither the arresting entity nor the individual would be engaged in “hostilities authorized by the AUMF.” On this reading—which which is fortified by the language clarifying that 1022 does not affect FBI authorities—the statute could only apply in the first instance to someone captured by a U.S. agency acting pursuant to the AUMF, which in effect would mean apprehensions by the armed forces overseas.)
Even so, enactment of section 1022, ambiguous and potentially toothless though it may be, is not without costs. It might well convey to the world that the American legislature views military detention as an unremarkable, even preferred, option in some terrorism cases, thereby blurring the important message the President has been endeavoring to convey, through word and practice, that “[t]he strong preference of this Administration is to accomplish [incapacitation of persons who are threats to the American people] through prosecution.” Moreover, as Raha Wala points out, the very existence of section 1022 might give a future Administration a slight measure of political cover if it decides to reverse President Obama’s policy and begin to detain in military custody persons such as another Abdulmutallab, who are captured in the United States. All in all, then, section 1022 is an unwelcome provision, even if it will (as we hope) have little or no practical impact on executive practice.
The Good
It is also worth emphasizing, however, that the Obama Administration, civil liberties and human rights organizations, and some members of Congress worked tirelessly and quite effectively to improve the final bill dramatically from the versions the Senate and (especially) the House had earlier passed. Because of those efforts, Subtitle D of the NDAA is not nearly as problematic as many critics have suggested. Indeed, the final bill actually contains a handful of provisions that improve upon current law, and one—which will be our focus here—that helps to resolve an important interpretive debate about whether the Executive’s detention authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) should be informed and limited by the laws of war.
The New York Times editorial on the NDAA is, unfortunately, representative of many of the false alarms being sounded about the legislation. The Times complains that the NDAA “ban[s] . . . spending any money for civilian trials for any accused terrorist,” “strip[s] the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists,” and “give[s] future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial.”
If this were an accurate description of the final legislation, it would be even more extreme than the House-passed version, which the President’s senior advisers recommended that he veto. But the bill the President just signed does none of these things.